10.31.2018

I
need and plan to work more on this story, but it'll do for now. Enjoy!

Just Leave

Warren
and his sister were thick in the midst of sorting out his parents’ estate. Their
mother had died of congestive heart failure a little over two years prior, and
their father, though seemingly healthy overall, had deteriorated in the interim
and recently succumbed to lung cancer, which he hadn’t told anyone about until
the last days. Both had smoked for more than 70 years, and the utter permeation
of the house’s every inch by tar and nicotine was one of the main reasons
Warren hated visiting. That smoke smell would be hell to get out, Warren
worried, especially if they were going to sell the house.

He
had driven the 3 hours or so up to his parents’ house (former house, he kept thinking) that afternoon to sort through some
of his father’s belongings. Will it look
different to me now?, Warren had wondered during the drive. He had only been
there once since his father died and realized that he’d never known a time when
the house had no real owners, no occupants.

But
the house looked the same, of course. An apparent one-story from the front, an
actual two-story from the rear owing to its position on a hillside, the Dimion
homestead was perfectly traditional, discolored tan brick and an aging hip roof
surrounded by an unremarkable but tidy yard. Trees Warren had played in or
around as a kid were long gone, either from age or ice storms. None of the
houses in their neighborhood looked even remotely similar to one another, which
always made Warren feel an involuntary and illogical pride.

He
found the spare key where it had been stashed for years – under a landscaping
stone covered with bark mulch to the front porch’s left – and went in the
house, catching the stinging odor of cigarette smoke before he even opened the
door. Although his sister had texted him earlier in the day to say she’d
already removed most of the furniture, he was unprepared for the empty room
that greeted his entrance: where once had stood a dining table, chairs, TV, and
roll-top desk, now there was only discolored and indented carpet. The sitting
room just to the left was empty as well, and its bare faux-wood floor hollowly
reverberated the closing front door. Only then did it occur to Warren that all
the beds were probably gone too, meaning he’d have nowhere comfortable to
sleep.

Wandering
through the house, the creaky kitchen floor (you entered on the second floor,
at the foundational hill’s apex) sounded louder than he remembered, likely
because of the rooms’ emptiness, and he grinned at the minutiae left behind:
two stained oven mitts hanging next to the stove, a comically obsolete list of
phone numbers taped to the wall, three stair-stepped containers he really hoped
didn’t still contain sugar-free cookies, the incongruously new washer and dryer.

Down
the carpeted and equally creaky stairs, past the chairlift his mother once
used, Warren found more of the same: newly furniture-less carpet, splayed-open
cardboard boxes holding trinkets and photo albums, a metal trash can, a
Garfield sticker on a full-length mirror. The bottom floor was half underground
and smelled reliably dank, an oddly pleasant odor Warren auto-associated with
his youth. Off to the right of the stairs, his father’s bedroom loomed
pitch-black, and Warren felt a twinge of an old childhood fear at approaching
this lightless basement room alone. The fear escalated more than Warren wished
to admit while he slapped around fruitlessly for the light switch, but when his
hands found it, the slow fade of the fluorescent overheads eroded that feeling
and revealed a truly empty space: not only was all the furniture gone but the
carpet and pad had been pulled up as well, owing to the subterranean seepage
against which his parents had fought mostly in vain for nearly 40 years. The
painted concrete floor’s stains and peeling made the room look less like
sleeping quarters and more like an interrogation chamber.

Warren
exited (but left the light on) and walked into what his family had always
called the rec room, a lengthy space (42
feet end to end, his mind hiccupped) that had once held an elaborate
stereo, stacks of vinyl albums, a wall of books, several generations of
video-game consoles (Colecovision through Super Nintendo, if memory served),
and both ping-pong and pool tables. All that remained now was the pool table.
He’d hoped the old futon couch would still be here so he could sleep on it
(uncomfortable though it was), but no. Even the bookshelves and firewood box
were barren.

“The
goddamn pool table,” Warren sighed. No wonder it got left behind. The ping pong
table was bought new and had still, four decades on, been in good shape, though
the net needed replacing. This thing, on the other hand, had become shabby
family legend almost instantly. Warren’s father bought it soon after they’d moved
in from a decrepit billiard hall that was going out of business. It was visibly
worn from day one, boasting scratches and scuffs but also an almost comic
instability – when touched or bumped, it creaked and swayed side to side.
Warren had tightened the relevant bolts countless times (his father was
hopelessly unhandy), but it never lasted long, and this ritual had provided
Warren with one of his favorite memories, a memory that came flooding back as
he stood in this huge, unfamiliarly-empty room. Something about lying on his
back under the pool table put Warren at peace, and he would regularly crawl
underneath it when the legs needed tightening and just stay there, flat on his
back, gazing at the table’s dusty underside, staring at the light seeping evocatively
through the spaces between ill-joined pieces of wood. More than once, Warren
had lost track of time during this weird reverie, never sleeping but perhaps
not entirely conscious, either, eventually rolling out onto the open floor and
rejoining the family upstairs, his parents asking where he’d been all this
time. Warren grinned at the memory’s richness and subliminally understood where
he’d sleep this night. The house held no softer, padded surfaces anymore,
anyway, so what did it matter where he lay?

He
wondered if the balls were still in the table and reached into the return
opening, scraping the back of his hand on broken plastic molding. The balls
were there, all right, and Warren involuntarily grabbed three of them, numbers
4, 5, and 9. He thunked them onto the faded green felt and remembered the
table’s most famous trait: it was warped such that any rail shots curved toward
the center. As kids, he and his friends learned very quickly to use that warp
to their advantage, playing the curve to hit balls that might have been
unreachable on a regulation, defect-free surface. There were no longer any
cues, of course, but Warren picked up the 5 and gently underhanded it along the
right-hand rail, chuckling as it passed the side pocket and arced toward the middle
as he’d seen it do hundreds of times before. Then his muscle memory kicked in
and he grabbed the other two balls, rolling them rapidly toward the 5 and
banking them off the far rails so they’d sink in the corner pockets. It took
him a few tries but he finally sunk them all, enjoying the
still-immensely-satisfying sound of pocketing balls.

Warren
rapped the table surface twice and was walking toward the rec-room windows when
his phone buzzed. You get there OK?,
his sister Alice texted. He re-pocketed his phone, continued to the windows,
and pulled open the curtains. Holly bushes still rose about a third of the way
up the windows; above that Warren saw the few small remaining trees in the
backyard, the top of the viny back fenceline, and the dusky indigo sky tinged
with oranges and purples from the setting sun. He surveyed this scene for a few
moments and was about to reply to Alice when he heard the upstairs floor creak
overhead behind him.

Warren
frowned and looked around at where the sound seemed to have come from. He tried
to remember if Alice was in town – she lived half an hour away with her second
husband and two stepsons – but thought she wasn’t. She had always visited more
regularly than Warren had, so it wouldn’t be unheard of for her to drop by
unannounced, but he half remembered her saying she was traveling this weekend.
He plucked out his phone and typed, Yeah,
easy trip. Are you in town? In a few seconds she replied, No. At the in-laws til Sunday. That’s right. OK. Have fun, Warren sent
back. Alice responded with a thumbs-up emoji.

He
tried to think of any other friends or family members who might have come over
and into the house. His parents, though, had been virtual hermits for the past
20 years, rarely leaving the house and maintaining almost no friendships. Most
of their closest relatives had already died, and those relatives’ offspring
were scattered elsewhere around the country, so Warren doubted there was anyone
left who would be here. A neighbor? Possible but unlikely, as the Dimions had
never consorted much with their neighbors. Hospice or caregivers? Even less
likely – his mother had refused hospice care, and his father didn’t tell anyone
he was dying let alone arrange for hired help. Maybe I imagined it, Warren
thought.

He
was heading back through the long room bound for the stairs when the floor
creaked again, this time directly above him. He stopped and looked up at the
ceiling. “Well. Didn’t imagine that,” he muttered. His pace quickened as he
approached his father’s room (glad I left
the light on, he mused) and climbed the stairs to his right, eyes on the
landing above, not worried about being quiet or stealthy. “Hello?” he said from
the doorway into the empty kitchen. “Somebody here?” He crossed the long
kitchen floor toward the front door looking for signs of ingress but found
none: the balcony door off the kitchen to his left was still closed as was the
front door. He walked through all the upstairs rooms, but they were empty save
for more moving-house minutiae.

He
then walked out into the front yard. The driveway held only his gray Corolla,
and the street was empty other than a few cars parked in front of neighboring
houses. Looking up at the darkening sky, he breathed in deeply for several
moments, savoring the cool, smoke-free air. “Maybe it’s just settling,” he
muttered after a long exhale. As if this idea resolved the issue, he went to
get his overnight bag from the car and had just reached the right-rear-door
handle when he heard the house’s metal security door bang shut. He gasped and
pivoted, heart pounding in his ears. No one was on the front porch, and the
inner door was still open. “What the fuck?” Warren said, uncomfortable at the
quaver in his voice. He immediately got irritated, grabbed his bag from the
car’s backseat, slammed the car door, and marched toward the house, locking the
car with a squeeze of the key fob.

On
the porch, he dropped his bag and opened the security door to full gape so he
could time its closing. He watched as it swung slowly shut, finally slamming
home with a decisive bang. Eight seconds. I
was out here longer than eight seconds, he thought, smirking. He opened the
door again, pushed it all the way to the wall, and held it there for a moment
before releasing it. This time, the door remained idle for one…two…a little
over three seconds before it began its slow arc. After it banged shut again, he
thought, So, say twelve seconds. Enough
time? Warren decided it was. Although he was sure he heard the door close
after he walked out, maybe that was just an aural memory. Maybe it took longer
to ease shut than it used to. “Stop being an idiot,” Warren said to himself
dismissively. He went inside and threw the deadbolts on both front doors.

After
using the restroom and searching fruitlessly for food, he ordered a pizza to be
delivered.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later,
under the pool table, Warren watched Netflix for a while on his phone until he
got sleepy. He hadn’t thought to bring a pillow or blanket, so his overnight
bag and windbreaker served these purposes.

With
the curtains drawn, the room was nearly pitch black, and it irked Warren to
discover that he was scared. The pool table was at the far end of the long room
relative to the door, meaning he was all-too aware of the forty-plus feet of
darkness nearby. He resisted the urge to pull his windbreaker over his head and
instead just focused on the table’s underside until his eyes began to get
heavy.

Soon
Warren was dreaming about a volcano out of which sprouted a horned, Fantasia-like demon that threw purplish
lightning bolts at a smoky, ruined landscape. He wasn’t sure what eventually
jolted him awake, and he had just instinctively remembered the earlier floor
creaks overhead when he heard the front security door slam shut upstairs.
“Fuck,” Warren gasped. Don’t sit up and
hit your head, he thought sarcastically. He lay motionless waiting for some
other sound, his mind attempting to tick methodically through reasons the door
would have slammed. Only one, he
thought – someone coming in or going out.
With a sudden rush of courage, Warren rolled out from under the table (don’t turn your back on the darkness!,
his younger self shouted), stood, and willed himself through the lightless room
until he got to the door and light switch. He flicked it on with an index
finger and whirled around to survey the room, which was empty, of course. He
stood there several seconds and was just about to head upstairs when the
upstairs floor creaked, this time toward the end of the room, beyond the pool
table. “All right, asshole,” Warren said quietly, “Time to end this.” He looked
around and rummaged in cardboard boxes for a weapon – his dad had owned a few
military-issue pistols that were surely long gone – but found nothing more
sinister than what appeared to be a third- or fourth-grade school photo of his
sister in a silver metal frame. Despite the amateurish book and ruler outlines
etched into the frame, it was solid and heavy, which he proved to himself by
slapping it into his palm a few times. “OK, sis. Let’s go,” he said.

Warren
sped past the darkened bedroom to his left and concentrated on taking the
stairs two at a time, which did nothing to prevent the hairs on the back of his
neck from prickling up like always. He stepped into the kitchen, hit the light,
and lifted the picture frame prepared to strike, but there was no one there.
“Hello?” he called after a beat and held his breath to focus his hearing. Not a
sound. He walked across the long kitchen floor, creaking as he went and blankly
comparing his creaks to the ones he’d heard downstairs, senses alert for any
disturbance. His pulse quickened as he peeked into the entry hall, but the
front door was closed and locked just like he’d left it. He walked to it,
turned the deadbolt, and slowly opened the inner door. The metal security door
was closed as well. Warren pushed on it gingerly, but it had no give
whatsoever. He sighed, stepped up to the security door, and looked out the
window.

A
dark shape appeared to be moving where the corners of the yard and the driveway
met the street. Warren stared at the shape with incomprehension. His first
unbidden thought was that it was a trash bag, but he hadn’t yet set out
anything to throw away. A dog?, he
wondered. No, it was too flattened, seemed too formless. But it was definitely
moving – he could see that now.

Warren
turned the deadbolt, opened the door, and stepped out onto the cold concrete
front step before walking into the dewy grass, never taking his eyes from the
dark shape, whose slowly moving surface bore a yellowy sheen from the
streetlight. Stepping around one of the yard’s lone remaining trees, he was
about five feet from the shape when he stopped abruptly and went cold from the
inside out.

The
shape was indeed a large black trash bag that pulsed weakly in and out at
irregular intervals and angles. Warren could hear something sliding and pushing
against the smooth plastic as the movements continued. He stepped closer
despite the rising panic and started to hear whimpers. “Hey,” he said
involuntarily. It was then he realized someone was inside the bag, the pulsing
movements feeble attempts to tear the plastic and escape.

“Hey,”
he said again without really knowing he’d done it. He stepped right up next to
the bag and put his hands on his knees, peering intently at the jerkily
undulating shape. I have to call the
police, Warren thought, and he had just slapped at his right hip looking
for his phone when the metal security door slammed shut again. “FUCK!” he
shouted, jumping back and nearly falling down. He looked at the front door, but
no one was there. And then the bag said his name.

Warren.

He
looked down at the bag. It was torn open. A naked, jaundiced figure lay coiled
up inside but moving slowly, an elbow and a forearm appearing, and then a face
in profile. Warren stared, eyes wide. The picture frame slid out of his sweaty
palm and hit the ground.

It
was his mother.

Warren.

Her
head turned slowly toward him. Her skin was yellow and saggy, with grime
visible in the creases even in the wan light.

Warren.

She
looked at him with mustardy eyeballs. Her voice was a croaky whisper, her
throat clotted.

Warren. Run.

Warren
began to sob. “Mom!” he managed. “What is this?”

Run. A thin arm the
color of fish belly then pushed out of the bag opening, wrapped itself around
his mother’s body, and pulled her with obvious effort farther down into the
bag. Her face contorted into the most anguished look he’d ever seen before her
body doubled in on itself painfully and disappeared.

“Mom!”
he shrieked. Then Warren threw himself onto his knees and reached in with both
arms to pull his mother out, but he fell into the bag, into darkness, and he
lost consciousness, the scent of old earth and fresh decay in his nostrils.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Warren
awoke to a dull ache down his right side. He lifted his head, but his neck had
such a crick he couldn’t lift it far. He opened his eyes and was hopelessly
confused for a few seconds, because what he saw was his car. He blinked at it a
few times and then craned his neck around despite the pain. He was in the front
yard, curled up in his gym shorts and t-shirt, shivering from the chill, wet
with dew, exposed skin prickly and cross-hatched from the crisp autumn grass.

It
was early daylight, perhaps 6:30 a.m. Warren lay his head back down on the
ground for a moment and tried to gather thoughts. When details from the night
before began coalescing, he remembered the dark shape and why he had come
outside, and he shot up off the ground with a panicked groan despite the
soreness in his side and neck. His bare feet scuffed along the rough gray
driveway as he balanced himself and looked down where the trash bag had been
last night. But other than a flattened patch where he had lain (all night, he
thought with distaste), the grass showed nothing. He looked instinctively up at
the front door and scanned the immediate vicinity in front of him. Nothing
seemed amiss. Warren exhaled as if he hadn’t done so in hours. “Fuckin’-A,” he
blurted and laughed.

Shaken
by the lingering images but relieved nonetheless, Warren walked slowly down the
driveway and sidewalk to the front door. He was about to mount the small steps
to the porch when he froze.

There
were dirty smears all over the porch’s painted concrete, as though someone with
muddy feet had repeatedly slipped while trying to enter the house.

Warren
stared at this sight until a wiry panic made him look down. The short expanse
of gray concrete between the grass and the steps also bore streaks of mud along
with a few larger clogs, and he had stepped right in it all. He lifted his
right foot to inspect the sole – it was filthy.

“Shit,”
he spat and hopped backward into the grass where he dragged them one at a time
to get rid of the mud. When they were cleaner and damp with dew, he looked back
up at the porch, saw the streaky mud again, and exhaled irritatedly through his
nostrils.

“I
am going inside. I am getting dressed. I am gathering my shit. I am locking the
door. And I am leaving.” Warren said all this firmly and pointedly as though
trying to convince himself to do it. He maneuvered around the mud and opened
the metal security door (no mud on the
doorknob, his mind noted). But his strides into the house were short-lived.
Once inside the foyer, what he saw stopped his motion with the force of a large
fist in the middle of his chest.

There
were more muddy streaks on the foyer’s white ceramic tile and on the kitchen’s
old, indented carpet. And beyond that lay a torn black trash bag. It was empty
but dirty and visibly stretched, as though something inside had forced its way
out. Not fully aware that he was doing so, Warren walked forward to see what he
already knew was there beyond the bag. Muddy streaks, splayed at crazy angles
on the carpet and extending to the end of the kitchen, all the way to the door
that led to the laundry room and the stairs.

I should leave
right now,
Warren mused, but everything’s downstairs
– clothes, car key, phone, everything. The thought of his phone made him
look on the wall where his parents’ old landline phone always hung. It was
still there. Call 911, his mind
shouted. And tell them what?, he
countered. Someone tracked mud into the
house and left a trash bag behind?

“No,”
he said aloud back to himself. “Say someone’s in the house.” An intruder, he added mentally. Stepping
to the phone, careful to avoid the mud, he plucked the handset out of its
cradle, put it to his ear, and started to dial but realized there was no dial
tone. Punching the numbers anyway did nothing. As he began to hang up, he heard
a sound like low white noise. He put the handset back to his ear. “Hello?”

Intruder. Back to a single
voice, the same raspy one as before. Then, after a beat, came a different
voice. It was loud and booming and guttural and furious.

INTRUDER!

“GODDAMN
IT!” Warren shouted involuntarily, and he threw the handset at the wall. “FUCK
YOU!” he screamed, nearly hysterical.

The
voice from the phone was repeating INTRUDER!
over and over so loudly Warren could hear it clearly even with the handset
lying on the floor six feet away from him, its long, tangled cord still swaying
after his throw. He scrambled over and grabbed the cord so he could hang up,
but he had too much slack, and the handset shot off the floor, smacked him in
the knee, and then ricocheted upward, narrowly missing his chin and nose. After
he finally grasped the handset, the voice still bellowing, he slammed it down
into the cradle and marched toward the stairs, sidestepping the bag and the
mud, maniacally determined to leave as fast as possible.

Before
he made it to the stairs, though, he heard one of the bedroom doors pop open down
the hall back beyond the front door, and he froze in place.

Heavy
footsteps in the hall.

“Who’s
there?” Warren called.

The
footsteps stopped, but he still heard the floorboards creak as if under
shifting weight.

“Answer
me,” Warren demanded. “Who’s there?”

The
same voice from the phone, the quieter one: Intruder.
Warren’s heart felt like it would stop. He tried to say something, but his
mouth and throat suddenly felt sandblasted.

The
louder voice again: INTRUDER!

Warren
ran. Out of the kitchen, down the stairs two and three at a time. He bolted
into the rec room and all the way to the pool table, throwing himself
underneath to grab his bag and windbreaker. His head was a maelstrom of wild
thoughts (Fuckin’ house is haunted! Lost
my fuckin’ mind! Haven’t smoked pot or done acid or been blackout drunk in
years!), and then he collapsed, openly weeping from fear and stress.

His
sobs subsided after a few minutes, and he lay there with his face in the old
carpet, snot and tears running into the fibers. My phone. Alice, he thought suddenly. He propped up on his elbows and
reached for his phone. Dead. He’d evidently fallen asleep without plugging it
in. “Of fucking course,” he said bitterly and wiped his messy nose on his bare
arm. Just leave, he thought. Just leave.

Before
he could push himself off the floor, a billiard ball rolled on the table
surface a few feet above his head. Warren froze and held his breath. He heard
the ball’s rolling cease as it bumped softly against a rail. A few seconds of
total silence. Then another ball rolled. And then came a sound like an entire
roomful of billiard balls hitting the surface in a cascade, repeatedly knocking
and rolling like indoor thunder, and soon billiard balls were raining off the
creaky and swaying table, bouncing onto the carpet and rolling all over the
room, clacking against each other and the baseboards, as though a tornado had
sucked up a billiard hall and spewed its contents all over creation. Warren
watched with wide eyes and was sure he could feel the threads of his sanity
snapping apart. Eventually he just put his head down and hoped it would stop.

After
a time, there was silence again. Warren looked up and around and saw mounds of
billiard balls everywhere around the table and the room, piled atop each other
despite their surface slickness. He snorted a nervous laugh in spite of himself
at the ludicrousness of the scene.

Then
he heard the creaking upstairs. Feet moving over the floorboards. This time,
though, the sound was heavier, more definite. And soon it became a series of
booming steps, like someone in cinder-block shoes running through the kitchen,
running to the stairs and toward him, bounding down to the basement level.
BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The sound was impossibly loud. Warren thought his heart
would explode in terror.

With
nowhere to run, Warren balled himself up, still under the pool table, face in
the carpet, hands covering his head, knees at his chest. Go away go away go away!, his mind repeated.

Soon
there was silence again. Warren looked up, hoping the balls wouldn’t be there,
but they were. He listened for footsteps in the room but heard nothing. After
gathering his courage, he climbed out from under the table and stood up.

There
really were mounds of billiard balls all over the large room. Easily hundreds
of them. The tabletop held plenty too. Warren looked up expecting to see a hole
in the ceiling, punched through by falling billiard balls, but it was intact.

“Fuck
this,” he muttered and dropped to the floor to cram his clothes, shoes and
socks, windbreaker, and phone into his bag. Then he stood up and turned around
to leave and had just begun to maneuver around the balls when he saw movement
to his immediate right. A mini-avalanche of billiard balls clacked down the
slope of a large mound, rolling into his feet and revealing a black hole around
which the surrounding billiard balls somehow maintained their positions, as
though they were shiny round bricks packed into mortar. And then came a sound
he’d heard the night before: a slippery pushing against plastic, trying to get
out. Warren wanted to look away but found he couldn’t. Black plastic began to
stretch outward from the hole. Run, Warren’s mind screamed, but he was
transfixed.

A
tear appeared in the plastic, followed by familiar yellowed flesh, mottled with
grime.

Warren. His mother again.

Warren. Run.

Run.

But
it was too late. The thin white arm shot out of the mound and snatched Warren’s
calf so hard and fast that he fell and did the splits, like a bad cheerleader.
The arm already had his right leg halfway inside the hole, and he felt himself
being slowly dragged over billiard balls and carpet toward that opening. Warren
screamed wordlessly and fought to get loose, but what had been set in motion
would not be stopped. As he was pulled into the hole, his left hip in agony
from his backward-stretched left leg, he struggled for purchase on the mound of
billiard balls, but his hands just slid around on the smooth surfaces. Then he
passed completely into the hole, the stench of decay and fetid earth filling
his head, and he was gone.

I
started this exercise on October 1 by singing Adam Nevill’s praises for Last Days, and while I’ll eventually get
to another of his novels, we now arrive at his first short-story collection. Some Will Not Sleep brings together
previously-published stories from throughout Nevill’s career, so it’s
worthwhile for the completionist fan (e.g., me) regardless of literary quality,
but fret not about the quality – all of these tales are good, and several are
superb enough to merit individual mention/inspection. “The Original Occupant,”
with its Briton searching for a lost friend in Scandinavia, is an obvious
antecedent for Nevill’s own The Ritual
(he himself says as much in the “About These Horrors: Story Notes” section),
and anything related to that book almost has to be golden. “Yellow Teeth” is a
longer story whose length expertly builds both tension and your own disdain for
the roommate/squatter whose audacity drives the plot toward a horrific
conclusion (this tale also inspired a more recent Nevill book, Under a Watchful Eye). Despite its flat,
placeholder-ish title, “Pig Thing” is an enormously effective example of short
fiction’s compact power: stretched into a novel, this story about a…well, yeah,
about a pig thing selectively stalking New Zealand villagers might easily
become pedestrian, but in short form it’s taut, detailed, and merciless. “What
God Hath Wrought?” is equal parts Blood
Meridian, The Dark Tower, and Nevill’s own Last Days, all in a dozen or so pages, and if this combination
doesn’t get your attention, then what are you even doing with your life? Here’s
one story you’ll wish were longer.

And
then there’s “The Ancestors,” the best selection in the book. When I finished
this one – think of it as Toy Story
plus Kôji Suzuki minus any trace of novelty or mirth – I felt I’d been
gut-punched by a gigantic and sneaky fist. It does so much with so little (heh)
in so few pages that I don’t think I could have anticipated the enormity of the
ending, and I doubt you will either. In a lifetime of reading, I can’t recall
ever being this deeply unsettled by a short story. Such is the power of
Nevill’s writing. Worth mentioning too are the hardcover’s tactile pleasures:
the lightly-raspy dust-jacket texture, the luxurious paper stock, the
super-creepy cover art (see photo), the recurring Ritual Limited
black-goatskull-of-the-woods sigil. So, yes, get this book. Your hands and eyes
will thank you, even if its contents prevent you from sleeping. Buy it here: http://www.adamlgnevill.com/ritual-limited-shop/.

October Horror “Goodie” 17/31: Summer of Night (1991)

Buckle
up, folks, because it’s sacred-cow-stabbing time…

Dan
Simmons needs an editor, or a tough-love friend, or a
tough-loving-editor-friend, or something. He can be an inarguably great writer,
but his books tend to drag on longer than The
Walking Dead (which I absolutely hate). The first Simmons book I read was The Terror, his partial-fiction account
of an ill-fated Arctic expedition that, despite its length and occasional
bloat, is a badass book weaving microbiologist-level historical detail, Inuit
mythology, and ice. (Also, its AMC miniseries adaptation is excellent.) Then I
read Drood, Simmons’s what-if about
the last days of Charles Dickens, the general unreliability of Wilkie Collins
as a decent human being, and a haint named Drood who perhaps inspired Dickens’s
unfinished final novel and who I, for some reason, picture as looking like Al
Lewis / Grandpa Munster after a head-on collision. The Drood concept is fantastic, and many of its scenes are masterfully
rendered, but – and I really think Simmons tried to emulate Dickens here – the
whole affair just takes too damned long. If it were maybe 300 pages – you know,
if it had been edited AT ALL – I think it’d be wonderful. Hell, if someone
would omit half the instances where Dickens says “My dear Wilkie,” the book
might sink below 200 pages. Plus, I wanted to bludgeon the omnipresent Collins
with a pipe wrench before the book even really got going; Simmons’s portrait of
Collins’s delusional, jealous ass makes Salieri look like Fred Rogers. And then
I read A Winter Haunting, which,
turns out, is a sequel to Summer of Night.
It’s slimmer and less bloated than Terror
and Drood, and it was a fun, quick
read that didn’t require having read its predecessor first, so if you’re
looking for a recommendation here, this is it: go read A Winter Haunting. (You should read The Terror and Drood as
well, but make sure you bring provisions.)

Which
brings me to Summer of Night, and it
mainly just pissed me off. Simmons’s penchant for minute detail and complex
plot skeins is on full display in this book, but I swear it seems like he got
tired, oh, around page 499 and just brought the whole thing to a deus ex machina-style close. All the
crazy shit that goes on – an oozing ghost soldier, putrefacted holes in the
ground, disappearing kids, shadows that push against closet doors, preteens
enduring lifetimes of physical and mental anguish in a few days – builds and
builds and builds for hundreds of pages……and then none of it gets tied together
except by small-town association with the much-too-desperately-named
Ashley-Montague family and their Borgia Bell that hung in the old school and
apparently caused lots of the aforementioned crazy shit. How did the bell
accomplish all this? What was its psycho-mechanical makeup? To what end were
kids killed or rendered undead? Whence that funnel-face the antagonists
apparently got while on the attack? Simmons answers none of this, even
obliquely. That old school gets pages and pages of exposition, which was fine
when I thought it had a payoff, but it didn’t. Now, I don’t need everything to
fit together perfectly in the end. I like messy, pomo, avant-garde stuff
aplenty. Not that Scott Smith is any of those things, but I read The Ruins a few years ago and liked it
very much specifically BECAUSE it has no tidy closing explanations, no overt
ugly-Americanism, no global-warming-related mutations. The vines were evidently
just evil, evil carnivores, period. Good. But killer vines in a relatively slim
novel are worlds away from a long and intricate plot that endeavors to paint an
entire community’s population in dusty, often mottled closeup. Imagine Stand by Me mashed up with Hellraiser minus the existence of
anything substantive and creative enough to link the two – that’s what Summer of Night was for me. I reacted
similarly to this book as I did to King’s It:
a number of promising elements and a handful of genuinely terrifying moments
that fizzle out lazily in the end. (See? Sacred cows. Told ya.)

Lest
I leave the impression that the whole book sucks (it doesn’t), one scene in Summer of Night is so effective it
almost makes up for the bullshit ending: page 339 in my copy, where Mike
O’Rourke watches Father Cavanaugh get attacked by the ghost soldier in the
cemetery. DAMN, MAN. Otherwise, meh. Go read A Winter Haunting.

October
Horror Goodie 18/31: Paranormal Activity
2-4 (2010-2012)

I
wrote at length here a while back about Paranormal
Activity and its spawn, so I’ll try to keep this brief and un-repetitive.
The usual genre and formula qualms aside, I consider PA1 a horror classic –
even knowing it’s fictional, it disturbed me enough to disrupt my sleep for a
night or two, and I’ve enjoyed it on repeat viewings. PA2 is a surprisingly worthy prequel that sometimes supersedes 1;
some of its plot and setting maneuvers are clever, and the baby-related scares
in particular are ROUGH. PA3 falters
in some of the usual ways but is mightily effective at times: the sheet-ghost
in the kitchen, the game of Bloody Mary, and the reveal-like climax are all
legitimately terrifying. Given this run, it’s unsurprising that PA4 fails to live up to its
predecessors’ successes. One of the main problems with the found-footage genre
is the ridiculous contortions to which filmmakers will/must resort to keep the
cameras rolling – after all, without a removed, omniscient, third-person
camera, how else will the goings-on get captured? And while I’m apparently more
willing or able than many to forgive such contortions, PA4 uses up all my forgiveness: once you resort to carrying around
laptops (or hyper-conveniently leaving them on) set to Skype/FaceTime, your
well is dry.

Or
is it? One quick scene in PA4 is
ingenious, surprising, and effectively spooky. Katie, the demon’s target in PA1, now lives across the street from an
unsuspecting family with the nephew she kidnapped in PA2 (then called Hunter, now called Robbie). Robbie befriends the
family’s similarly aged son, and because the demon (who, we learn in PA3, goes by Toby) sticks with Robbie
now, Robbie brings Toby into their home. One night, while they’re playing a
boxing game on Xbox Kinect, the kids realize there’s an extra “player” onscreen
– one more, in fact, than there are people visible in the room. This realization
occurs quickly, almost in an offhand or sidelong fashion, which, of course,
increases its effectiveness, since Toby’s presence is implied rather than
explied even though at one point this extra player looks straight into the Xbox
camera. (Why isn’t “explied” a word? You know what? I’m saying it’s a word.
Stupid prescriptivists.)

If
you suffer from coulrophobia, don’t watch this film. If you dislike gore, don’t
watch this film. If you dislike clown-involved gore, run. If you dislike clown-
and kid-involved gore, run faster. (Of course, I don’t actually like any of
these things either. I’m just talking about movies. Fictional, fantastical
movies.)

Produced
by Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel, Green
Inferno, the “Bear Jew” in Inglourious
Basterds), Clown’s premise is
straightforward: a father dons a clown costume to ensure his son gets the
birthday party he wants after the clown they booked cancels at the last minute,
and then afterwards the father can’t get the increasingly parasitic costume to
come off. How the father comes by this clown costume in the first place might
be the stupidest, most far-fetched coincidence I’ve ever seen in a movie (you
almost need to see it to believe it), but if you can get past this bit of lazy
screenwriting, the rest of the film is a lot of scary fun.

Because
it involves kids in dire peril, and because it involves Eli Roth, Clown is really, really shocking – this
is definitely one of those not-for-the-fainthearted outings where seemingly
every few minutes brings another “Aw, they’re not actually going to do THAT,
are they?,” and then, as sure as you’re born, they do it. I don’t want to give
anything away, but I will say that the semi-climactic set piece toward the end
occurs in a huge indoor playground (ball pits, labyrinthine slide structures,
etc.), and I’ll also say that whoever decided to put that clown in this setting
is a very particular kind of demented genius. Overall, this is a creepy,
well-made horror film that doesn’t skimp one bit on the gritty realism or blood
and guts (and noses, and arms…).

p.s.
Watch for the confetti! LOL

October
Horror Goodie 20/31: Pet Sematary
(1983)

Pet Sematary is probably my second
favorite Stephen King novel after The
Shining, but it’s the first I truly loved because I didn’t read The Shining until much later. And, to be
blunt, Pet Sematary scared the shit
out of me almost solely because of King’s evocation of those woods; they’re
frightening on their own – the Lazarusian burial ground and what it rebirths
just add to the horror. In fact, my favorite part of the book is the Wendigo
passage during Louis Creed’s trip to bury Church the cat – that sense Louis has
of something massive moving through the trees became immediate nightmare fuel
for me. Pet Sematary was also one of
the first novels (maybe THE first) where I truly cherished the movie of it I
made in my head. As a result, I’ve never cared for the 1989 film adaptation,
but I do have reasonably high hopes for the new one about to come out.

October
Horror Goodie 21/31: The Blair Witch
Project (1999)

The Blair Witch Project is embedded
firmly enough in our cultural consciousness that it may be easy to forget a
time when a sizable number of people really weren’t sure whether the story it
tells actually occurred. And while I overall don’t have much optimism about the
general population’s mean IQ, in this case the reason for the uncertainty had
less to do with intellect or reason and had much more to do with the relative
infancy of the internet. In 1999, we did have the internet, of course, and
email and message boards, but social media didn’t exist (at least not in any
widespread way): no mySpace (lol), no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube, nothing
that allowed things to go “viral” the way they do now, all of which meant
information traveled much more slowly than what we’re currently used to. Thus,
if someone back then went to the cinema to see The Blair Witch Project and was on the fence about its
authenticity, we should forgive that someone because fact-checking (wow,
remember “facts”? I miss those days) simply wasn’t the warp-speed process it
can be today.

I
guess I’m talking about myself, in a sense. I don’t believe in anything
supernatural at all, and I even read a review of this film beforehand that
stated the filmmakers created both the story and the frankly brilliant
marketing campaign around it, yet I remember going to the cinema on or around
Halloween and being unsure whether I was about to see a documentary or a
(hopefully) well-designed fake. Maybe I just wanted to feel like this to
enhance the viewing experience, but, in my memory, the uncertainty was
legitimate.

Regardless,
this viewing experience did not disappoint. Like many other people, I’d never
seen anything quite like The Blair Witch
Project. I was riveted, and I was thrilled by the folks in the theater who
reacted LOUDLY to the spectacle onscreen – I mean, most of the theater was
shouting stuff like “UH-UH! DON’T GO IN THERE!” and “AW, HELL NO!” and “WHAT
THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!” and “SHIT, I’D BE GONE! NOPE! NOPE!” through
two-thirds of the film. It was fun, and the film was scary.

And
then I drove home alone (I went with a buddy of mine, but we met at the theater
and drove separately). I’ve never been so aware of how sprawling and dark the
rear of a standard-size car can be. I had, as the jocks say, my head on a
swivel, constantly looking around for something in the backseat.

It
was awesome.

October
Horror Goodie 22/31: Grave Encounters
(2011)

The
found-footage genre was past stale by 2011, so horror fans then and now are
fully justified in groaning and eye-rolling when they encounter yet another
movie that asks us to believe the camera somehow kept recording (often at a
perfect angle) no matter how much splattery mayhem went on around it. Such is
the case with this movie. A film crew for the fictional reality show Grave Encounters goes to shoot an
episode in the also-fictional and allegedly haunted Collingwood Psychiatric
Hospital, and you can probably guess nearly everything that happens next:
skepticism, skepticism-but-WTF-was-that?, disbelief, false alarms, crew members
disappearing one by one, gradual explication, overwrought straight-into-the-camera
soliloquies, blood and gore, et al. And yet, I like this movie. Its setup and
framework are wincingly formulaic, but once the spooky shit starts happening,
there’s something about the way the hospital turns into an architectural Möbius
strip that’s hard to resist – the film crew literally can’t get out of the
building because every potential exit either dead-ends or takes them right back
inside. Plus there are plenty of genuinely terrifying moments, and the ghosts’
scary faces are awesome (see photo). Not a good film by any means but worth
your time for the sturdy scares.

October
Horror Goodie 23/31: Poltergeist
(1982)

Poltergeist
helped solidify one ofthe horror
genre’s most enduring formulas: family with young kids + unexplained occurrence
involving one kid + bizarre/scary events related to said occurrence + quirky
paranormal investigators (typically one female seer and two male technicians) +
revelation of past/heretofore unknown macabre occurrences + epic showdown of
Dark Forces versus family & paranormal investigators + partially happy
ending = horror movie. (Seriously, if you analyze movies from the 1980s forward,
you’ll see that a large number of the scary ones conform almost perfectly to
this scheme.) And this is also another film that’s become so culturally
entrenched (“They’re HEE-er!,” “Go into/away from the light,”“This house is
clear,” etc.), it’s easy to forget that, despite its plentiful schmaltz, Poltergeist has some incredibly scary
moments: the tree, specters floating downstairs, the deranged howling when
Diane (JoBeth Williams) opens the bedroom door, the mouth-like closet door and
its awful sentinel, that damn clown doll, and so on. However, as with the
original Halloween films, I also
bought the novelization of Poltergeist
back in the early 1980s, and I also read it several times, and I also liked it
better because it was scarier. A LOT scarier. For instance, remember the movie
scene where Marty the paranormal investigator sees maggots roiling out of a
steak on the countertop, pukes in a utility sink, and then proceeds to rip the
flesh off his face in the mirror, all of which was an imagined product of the
poltergeist’s shenanigans (i.e., this didn’t physically happen to him)?
Remember how terrifying this scene is? I’m not exaggerating in the slightest
when I tell you this same scene in the book goes on for several pages, and
what’s described in those pages is immeasurably worse than what’s in the movie.
Essentially, instead of tearing his face off, Marty becomes paralyzed (he can’t
move or cry out but otherwise retains all his senses) and must watch – and feel
– as armies of critters march toward and onto him and skin him clean. As in the
film, all this terrible shit doesn’t physically happen to him, but trust me
when I say this detail matters little to you as a reader. It’s incredibly
disturbing. Sadly, as with the Halloween
novels, I no longer have this book, but it does appear to be available from
Amazon (et al.) for reasonable sums. You’ve been warned...

October
Horror Goodie 24/31: The Omen (1976)

There’s
little left to say that hasn’t already been said about this classic, so I’ll
tell you two things you may not know. (You definitely don’t know the first
one.)

I
remember my godparents, who were always the coolest people in the world to me,
once talking about going to see The Omen
in the cinema and describing how my godfather was completely freaked out by
this movie. At one point, a lady in the theater had a bag of some sort whose
shadow or silhouette apparently looked to him like one of the Rottweilers, and
he screamed bloody murder right then and there. God, I love that story.

As
my previous posts have shown, I really like reading the books on which horror
films are based (or the tie-in novelizations), and this installment’s no
different. The Omen novel is brief,
scary, and enjoyable. I’d even say it’s a bit better than the film because the
film’s look and sound are now somewhat dated – except for the animal-park scene
with those godforsaken baboons. YIKES.

Oh,
also, how about the 2006 remake? (It was released on June 6, 2006 – heh.) It’s
actually not bad, certainly better than some other horror remakes (e.g., The Amityville Horror and A Nightmare on Elm Street redos are both
terrible). And casting Mia “Rosemary” Farrow as Mrs. Baylock was a particularly
inspired choice.

Hello,
Damien...

October
Horror Goodie 25/31: Shaun of the Dead
(2004)

To me,
perfect films can be somewhat different from favorite films. They may often
overlap, of course, but favorites can be imperfect (e.g., Apocalypto) while still conjuring certain memories or moods, all of
which combined might make them favorites. And yeah, the films I consider
perfect are some of my favorites: No
Country for Old Men, In Bruges, Eastern Promises, Quiz Show, That Thing You Do!,
and so on. But Shaun of the Dead
might be the most perfect film I’ve ever seen (I know that’s an oxymoron,
whatever):

(a)
It’s HILARIOUS; for instance, the scene where Shaun and Ed are going through
the vinyl collection looking for projectiles to hurl at the undead is, to
borrow one of their phrases, a slice of fried gold:

Ed: Purple Rain?

Shaun:
No.

Ed: Sign o' the Times?

Shaun:
Definitely not.

Ed:
The Batman soundtrack?

Shaun:
Throw it.

Ed:
Dire Straits?

Shaun:
Throw it.

Ed:
Ooh, Stone Roses.

Shaun:
Um, no.

Ed: Second Coming.

Shaun:
I like it!

(b)
Parts of it are genuinely terrifying; the scene with undead Pete lurking in the
shower creeps me out every time, and the last stand at the Winchester is
mercilessly intense (and also super gross when David gets eaten).

(c)
It’s genius-level clever: “The ‘zed’ word. Don’t say it,” “We’re coming to get
you, Barbara!,” the doppelganger group of friends, et al. The plenteous
horror-genre allusions and callbacks are as spot on as spot on can be.

(d)
It’s one of the only horror-comedies I like, mainly because of (a) & (b)
above – Shaun of the Dead is actually
funny, and it’s actually scary. Most horror-comedies tilt too far in one
direction for my taste (usually comedy), and anyway I’m not much for
horror-comedies to begin with; like the Offspring say, I gotta keep ‘em
separated.

Two
words. Say them with me now: FAST ZOMBIES™. I can well imagine that some film
prior to 2002 first introduced the idea of zombies that moved faster than
drunken sloths, but 28 Days Later…
certainly rammed this idea into the collective consciousness. And what a
brilliant idea it is. A slow-but-unstoppable horde of undead is terrifying
enough; the unstoppable-AND-hella-fast undead is an order of magnitude worse
(or better, if you’re watching). I also think the speedier variety pings
something in our DNA, a limbic memory that reaches back to our prehistoric
ancestors’ reality of being chased by feral creatures.

If
you’ve somehow never seen this film and its sequel, here’s a summary:

In 28 Days Later…, lab experimentation on a
“rage” virus runs amok after a band of PETA-like activists tries to free
infected chimpanzees and unknowingly unleashes this virus on London and then
the entire UK. Twenty-eight days after this, Jim the bicycle courier (Cillian
Murphy) wakes up from a coma (he was hit by a car before the infection
outbreak) in an utterly deserted hospital and wanders dazedly around for a bit
before he’s chased by a group of infected he disturbed in a church (this is one
of the scariest movie scenes ever). This chase leads him to two fellow
survivors, Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomi Harris, being a total badass),
who explain everything to the still-very-much-bewildered Jim. After “losing”
Mark (in another of the scariest scenes ever), Jim and Selena find two more
survivors, Hannah (Megan Burns) and Frank (the always-wonderful Brendan
Gleeson), and the four of them set out looking for a British Army base that’s
broadcasting “salvation is here!” over the radio. I’ll spare the rest to avoid
further spoilers, but suffice to say that 28
Days Later… is one of my perfect films: literally everything is handled in
the most believable way possible, the acting is superb, the dialogue is far
superior to that of many horror films, and the scary sequences are so well
executed and so intense that they’re nearly guaranteed to make you physically
uncomfortable, especially on a first viewing. This is a phenomenal achievement.

Which
means 28 Weeks Later… must be a
disappointment, right? WRONG. In Weeks,
we’re (ahem) 28 weeks beyond the events in Days,
and we begin at a house somewhere in the English countryside, where survivors
are holed up trying to reconstruct a normal life. A young boy on the run soon
arrives, but the undead who’ve been chasing him arrive too, and they proceed to
tear into the house and infect/kill nearly everyone. Don (Robert Carlyle)
escapes through an upstairs window and gets away via boat and canal (my GOD
this scene – YIKES). He ends up working for a US Army outpost in the UK to help
control the outbreak and restore order, and here he’s reunited with his
children Andy and Tammy (the outstandingly-named Mackintosh Muggleton and
Imogen Poots). Eventually the kids get bored and escape the military compound
to visit their old house; the outcome of this visit is one of the scariest,
most surprising turns I’ve ever seen a horror movie take. It is magnificent.
Again, I’ll skip the rest to avoid further spoilers. Unlike Days, Weeks has some flaws, the most
egregious of which in my opinion is the dynamic among the US Army personnel –
it’s lazy, obvious, formulaic action-movie claptrap, and it’s worlds away from
the more naturalistic UK Army dynamic in Days.
Otherwise, though, almost every frame of Weeks
is fantastic, and it has sequences that are as scary and as effective as
anything in Days (watch especially
for the subway scene toward the end – YIKES).

Lastly,
the soundtrack to 28 Days Later… is a
real keeper, equal parts ethereal beauty and abject, teeth-grinding terror. It
adds immeasurably to the film’s already-formidable power.

October
Horror Goodie 27/31: The Ritual
(2011)

My
two favorite novels of all time are Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Number
three is Adam Nevill’s The Ritual,
which should tell you something about the esteem in which I hold it. As with
Nevill’s Last Days (which began this
tedious little exercise), when I finished The
Ritual for the first time, I flipped back to the first page and started
again. It’s that good; it grabbed me that much. (I’ve now read it four times.)

Longtime
friends Dom, Phil, Luke, and Hutch embark on a hiking trip into a very remote
Swedish forest, and, as the book’s opening sentence indicates, the trip was a
disaster from the beginning: “And on the second day things did not get better.”
They find a “dead thing” hanging high up in a tree; it seems to be a deer or
elk, but they can’t tell for sure because it’s been so drastically gutted and
splayed. This is the book’s opening scene, and it sets the tone for their
doomed journey. They spend a night in a decrepit cabin that’s abandoned except
for a pagan shrine in the attic, Nevill’s description of which is the first of
many chilling tour de force passages in this book.

Tensions
old and new arise as the friends struggle through the woods trying to get back
to civilization, and the being that left the gory welcome in the tree
eventually makes similar work of them all save Luke, who wakes up in a “bed”
and house you almost have to read about to believe. He’s been rescued (sort of)
by a Scandinavian black-metal band named Blood Frenzy who, because they’re a
Scandinavian black-metal band, worship the Black Goat of the Woods and indulge
in ritualistic violence while waiting for/trying to bring about Ragnarok. These
characters – named Loki, Fenris, and Surtr – live with a nameless and
incredibly old woman who tends to Luke’s numerous wounds, but her care has
little to do with Luke’s well-being and far more to do with preparing him for
the sacrifice she and Blood Frenzy have planned. The unfolding of this ritual
makes up the final quarter of the book, the details of which, of course, I’ll
spare for those who haven’t read it.

I
don’t know how to adequately explain how frightening and well written The Ritual is. Almost every scene is as
superb as any horror fiction that’s ever been written. The main characters’ ill-fated
passage through the forest is a masterclass in narrative pacing, smothering
dread, and absolutely brutal terror; it’s a real humans-v.-(super)nature
workout, reminiscent of the intensest sequences in Deliverance (and if you’ve never read Deliverance – the novel upon which the infamous movie is based – oh
my god do it now). During one of Luke’s attempts at escape from Blood Frenzy,
he ventures into the ancient house’s attic, and what he sees there is one of
the most horrifying and macabre chapters I’ve ever encountered in a lifetime of
reading. And that’s nearly topped by the old woman’s singing near the novel’s
climax along with Luke’s discovery of what her singing actually means. It’s
just a brilliant, brilliant story.

As
you may know, The Ritual was made
into a film that played in UK cinemas last October and arrived on Netflix in
early 2018 (still streaming there now). My sky-high hopes for this adaptation
plummeted when I learned that the filmmakers cut the Blood Frenzy subplot
entirely; however, while I maintain the film would be much better with that
subplot intact, it’s actually very good on its own terms, in part because the
folk-horror elements that replaced Blood Frenzy are plenty scary. Still, if
you’ve neither read the novel nor seen the film, PLEASE read the novel first.
It is truly one of the greats.

OK,
we’re down to the final four, all of which will be fairly obvious picks...

October
Horror Goodie 28/31: The VVitch (2015
– currently streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime)

It’s
rare for a horror film to live up to its trailers [narrows eyes, glares at Halloween 2018], so I’m glad that the
joy I experienced when I first saw the trailer for The VVitch not only remained but grew exponentially. I saw it in
the cinema the weekend it debuted and loved it, but I could also tell that it
requires subtitles/captioning as the period dialect comes so thick and fast
that keeping up can be difficult. Compounding this is the film’s lack of overt
exposition (a very good thing) and use of mostly natural lighting, which means,
because the setting is 1630s New England, it’s dark A LOT, even during daytime
scenes. I’ve now watched The VVitch
perhaps a dozen times, and I consider it both a modern classic and one of the
most satisfying films I’ve ever seen in any genre. It’s also, of course,
incredibly frightening.

The
story revolves around a family of English newcomers to the continent who are,
as the movie opens, being cast out of their village because the father is
evidently too sternly religious even for these presumed Puritans. The family
then establishes their own homestead out in the wilderness, where things go
wrong immediately: their infant disappears (quite literally); the crops are
shit, so they’re courting starvation; everyone constantly bickers; the
hilarious, proto-ADD twins irritate everyone and sing creepy songs about Black
Phillip, the family’s boisterous goat; and so on. Then the oldest son, Caleb,
becomes lost in the woods, and when he returns, he’s changed – “witched,”
according to his mother, and that’s when everything really deteriorates.

Three
things:

1. The
scary scenes – the money shots – are just unbelievably terrifying. As awful as
the baby-snatching itself is, what comes next is enough to gray your hair
prematurely. The long, tense sequence where lost Caleb approaches a cabin while
a lovely young witch exits slowly and provocatively towards him is almost too
much to bear. And I 100% hid my eyes in the theater when the kids are locked in
the barn and they hear a loud thump on the roof.

2. An
earlier post of mine extols the virtues of this film’s soundtrack, and as
marvelous as it is on its own, its true power comes from hearing it accentuate
the onscreen goings-on, especially the Caleb/witch-cabin scene I mention just
above. Unholy shit.

3. The
ending. Jesus, THE ENDING. It’s such a bold move to handle all these events so
straightforwardly and then to conclude the exact same way. A masterstroke if
ever I’ve seen one. But I’ll also point out a delicious bit of IMDb trivia:
“Although the film's plot was intended to be taken literally, director Robert
Eggers has spoken about a few small hints him [sic] and the filmmakers left
throughout the film that one might interpret as reasoning behind the events,
beyond the obvious supernatural. For example, the rot on the corn is ergot – a
hallucinogenic fungus.”

Quite
simply, The VVitch is a masterpiece,
one of the best and scariest films of all time.

October
Horror Goodie 29/31: The Shining
(1980)

However
old I was when I first watched The
Shining (maybe 12 or 13?), I wasn’t ready. It’s one of the first movies
that truly freaked me out. Obviously, the now-legendary scenes played a huge
part in this: room 237, the elevator gushing an ocean of blood, those damn twin
girls, the quick pseudo-bear-costume-and-maybe-fellatio scene (it’s more like a
flash) that I thought would give me a heart attack the first time I saw it, and
so on. But honestly everything about this film freaked me out. Even to this
day, it’s just SINISTER top to bottom. The lighting is spooky. The camera
movements and angles are spooky. The score is unnerving. Something’s off about
the dialogue patterns – they’re abnormal, sort of floaty, unreal, nightmarish.
The color palette and lighting in that bathroom scene with Lloyd is like a graphic
designer’s depiction of insanity; it hurts my nerve endings when I watch it.

Compounding
the internal horrors of The Shining
are the details of its making, especially Kubrick’s perfectionist lunacy and
its effects on the actors. Shelley Duvall physically ran out of tears because
she had to do so many takes requiring hysterical crying, often with Kubrick
berating her, and some people say she never recovered from the experience
(Google her and see what I mean). Scatman Crothers was also reduced to tears at
one point because Kubrick kept making him do take after take after take of one
particular scene, none of which were supposedly all that different. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, Stephen King did not get along well at all with Kubrick and has
regularly bashed this film, saying it’s not a good adaptation of his work and
that the TV miniseries version with Steven Weber is superior (lol, OK dude,
whatever). Then there are the conspiracy theories about The Shining, most infamously codified in the documentary Room 237,
which is maybe the most batshit-crazy thing I’ve ever seen. While I won’t deny
some of this doc’s theories are interesting, to say its arguments are flimsy is
akin to saying New Orleans occasionally gets humid in August.

As
much as I love it, I can’t say Kubrick’s The
Shining is a perfect film – it’s too off kilter for that – but it’s
definitely one of the most singular and phenomenally effective horror movies
I’ve ever seen. Also, the source novel is my favorite Stephen King book by far
(despite the overly sentimental ending); 90-plus percent of it is as scary as
(if not scarier than) the film, especially the room 217 scene (they changed the
number for the adaptation), which, as I said earlier in the month, is the
scariest chapter in all of horror fiction. To underscore this point, I dove
back into The Shining several years
ago while on a work trip and just happened to read through the room 217 chapter
right before I tried to go to sleep. Note the phrasing here – no sleep for John
that night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

October
Horror Goodie 30/31: The Exorcist
(1973)

The Exorcist remains the
scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I was, thankfully, older when I saw this film
than I was with The Shining, but I
still wasn’t ready for it. I distinctly remember watching it in my bedroom when
I was perhaps 15 or 16, and I lasted until the relatively early scene where
Regan’s eyes roll over white and she first makes those awful sounds that we now
know came from Mercedes McCambridge but which seem wholly inhuman nonetheless.
I’m not sure I’ve ever moved faster than I did that night bolting from the
floor to the TV knob (not as many remotes back then, millenials).

I
won’t waste time blathering on about how soul-deep frightening this film is, ad
infinitum, but I will make two points.

1. The
25th anniversary director’s cut (“THE VERSION YOU’VE NEVER SEEN!” screamed the
ads) introduced us to the now-infamous “spider-walk” scene, which did what I’d
have thought impossible: it made The
Exorcist even scarier.

(I
know you must be tired of this next statement, but I’m an English major – what
else would you expect?)

2. As
extreme and shocking as the film is–- and it’s still shocking to me, 30-plus
years after first viewing – William Peter Blatty’s novel is just as
extreme/shocking, and in places it’s much, much worse. Even the spider-walk
scene is somehow just as horrifying in print.

Quod nomen mihi est? La plume de ma tante.

October
Horror Goodie 31/31: Halloween (1978)

And
so this list ends in the only place it possibly could. Just as the Vince
Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown ChristmasIS Christmas for me, John Carpenter’s HalloweenIS Halloween.

Like
some other older films on this list, I saw Halloween
too early, and it absolutely scared the living shit out of me, far more than The Exorcist initially because of how
early I saw it. I’ll even say it traumatized me: every darkened space,
jack-o-lantern, butcher knife, sheet-ghost, faux-crystal doorknob, or louvered
closet door was enough to make me worry about Michael Myers to the point of
anxiety. I am not exaggerating. I had sleep problems for an abnormally long period
of time, and while Halloween wasn’t the sole reason for this, I know all-too
intimately that it was a major factor.

Eventually,
this fear morphed into the adrenaline rush we horror fans know and enjoy, and
then that morphed into fascination. Similar to my addiction to Jaws, I’m borderline obsessed with the
culture of this film, from its status as one of the originators of the
slasher-flick genre and a bellwether of independent filmmaking to the things
the film doesn't do (no gore, almost no blood) and that peerless 5/4 theme
song.

FWIW,
(1) I love Halloween II (see previous
post); (2) I hate Halloween III: Season
of the Witch and have maybe never been as confused as I was when I first
read this novelization/saw this movie and could discern no connection with
Michael Myers, et al. (because none exists); (3) the other Halloween sequel-like installments are hot, stinky garbage; (4) I
actually like the Rob Zombie remakes (or whatever they are) a lot – they’re
very different films (bloodier, more violent, far less “innocent”) but scary
af; and (5) I was disappointed by the recently released version of Halloween – it’s mainly a sketch of what
could have been.

So I
watch the original Halloween several
times a year, mostly during October. It doesn’t really scare me the way it used
to, but I’m always amazed at how that dead white face, some well-placed
shadows, and those spare piano notes can make my skin crawl and worry about the
dark, empty spaces behind me in the living room. May it always be so.